Today, we are going to look at a unit based on a platform which can easily be made high-end, but in this case it was stripped down to mainstream. It is the Modecom Volcano 750 Gold, a 750W unit which is 80 PLUS Gold certified (@115 V). Yet it sells for less than 2500 CZK, or slightly over 380 PLN on Modecom’s home market in Poland. Lately, they also export to some east and north-east European countries where you can get these units (there is also 650W model) too.

The OEM for the Volcano 750 Gold is the Chinese SAMA, aka Guangzhou AOJIE Technologies Co. Ltd. They have some aggressive pricing as you can see yet produce some nice platforms, from performance point of view. So chances are this unit will perform well. The platform is on the market for some time, it is pretty much another iteration of 12V unit based upon Champion Micro resonant circuitry with synchronous transistor rectification.

So as you can see, it has single +12V output which can deliver 744 W or pretty much the full rated power output. The +3.3/+5V rails deliver 20 A each or 100 W combined, but thanks to DC-DC buck regulators I think they can supply more than 100 W just fine. Both the −12V and stand-by rails are slightly more powerful than usual, with the first supplying up to 0.5 A and the second up to 3 A. According to Modecom, from the more advanced protections, the Volcano 750 Gold only has OPP.

Packaging and accessories

The box is slightly larger, as the unit itself is large plus there is quite a pack of cables. On the front we can see a picture and a little very basic information. Not much more to see.

On the back the situation is not that much better. This time we can also see the number of connectors, that’s pretty much it. I have been told the cables are quite long, but how is a customer supposed to know that? There is no such information anywhere! Not on the box, not on the website! If you expected that long white text under the unit picture to tell you something, I have to let you down. There is pretty much just “Power Supply Volcano 750 Gold” there for several dozen countries in different languages. Some of the translations are actually even wrong. Hopefully Modecom will take my advice and revise the box.

The only place with at least some information is the top. We have some statements there about the technology and components, from which we can see the unit has Teapo caps. I guess, for that price, it can actually be an advantage. Yes, it can be worse than Teapo, though not much, if those will be the most common (and cheap) notoriously failing SC series. Other than that, there is not even power distribution table anywhere on the box, nor any compatibility statement about processor low power states etc. Now I know this platform has no problem with that, but ordinary user has no idea.

As for the extras, it is actually quite rich, considering the price. Both the unit and the modular cables come in textile bags. Then we have six long thumbscrews (because the worms are quite deep in the casing) and even some zip ties. Also the usual power cord and some leaflet, maybe it could also be considered manual. That would be three points for me.